A nanny state can deliver us more children

THERE has been much talk about the need to be open-minded in finding solutions to Scotland's population decline. Ironically, much of it has centred on curbing options for women, ie, making contraception and abortion more inaccessible. This kind of paternalism will not solve the problem. Instead we need open up options for women by developing the much-derided nanny state.

Let me explain. The spectre of population decline is all too real. Scotland's birth rate is now half that of the early 1960s when the average woman had two children by age 30 and went on to have one more. Today, 30-year-old women have, on average, one child, fewer than half will go on to have another. Does this matter in an overpopulated world? Yes it does. And in decades to come it is going to matter even more. The rise in the world's population is slowing down: India now has a birth rate lower than America in the 1950s. In rich countries it has gone into reverse. In order to replace their populations, societies need what demographers call a "total fertility rate" (the average number of children born to each woman in her fertile years) of just over two. No rich industrialised country, including Scotland, has reached this rate for a decade. In Spain and Italy it is 1.2. In Scotland it is 1.5, across Europe as a whole it is 1.4.

The long-term consequences of a low birth rate, especially combined with rises in life expectancy and falls in retirement age, are serious. Fewer workers mean less tax to pay for public services and old age pensions, labour shortages will restrict economic growth at a time when the public spending needs of an ageing population are greater than ever before.

Perhaps we can bribe people to have more children. Or perhaps, as Cardinal Winning thinks, we might condemn people for using birth control or having abortions: what he recently called, grotesquely, "the culture of death". There is a moral and practical problem with this approach. A woman's right to make her own decision about whether she has children is a fundamental mark of a civilised and democratic society. If we wish to revoke it we should be honest enough to say that we also want to return to societies (of the kind the Church was happy to preside over not so many generations ago) where men could force women to have children. Those days are (almost) gone. Let us not return to them. European countries tried such pro-nationalist policies in the 1920s and 1930s when birth rates first dipped. They didn't work. Fulminating against birth control simply spread more knowledge about it and in turn increased its popularity.

Why do we have fewer children today? There are three simple answers: time, money and disruption. The easiest way to become poor in modern Scotland is to have a child. 30% of children live in poverty - mainly because a single wage can rarely support a family. The costs of having children have risen faster than incomes. But what about two-earner families: by far the most common arrangement nowadays? Here the problem is time: juggling career, childcare and everyday living needs a degree in circus skills. It is aggravated by the long hours culture in many workplaces: possible when families had one breadwinner, unworkable with two.

Finally, in urban, mobile societies, infants disrupt parents' lives far more than before. In rural societies children could be minded while families went about their everyday activities, many of which took place in the home. It is hard to imagine a more hostile environment for a child than a modern city.

The reconciliation of work and family is rightly becoming a hot political topic, but there is bad news for politicians expecting a quick fix. Marginal improvements in parental leave, working hours, tax breaks or benefits will not reverse the decline in the birth rate, because they will still leave people who choose to become parents much worse off than those who do not. People will still postpone having children until they feel able to cope, eventually having fewer children or none at all.

Individual employers or parents cannot escape the vicious anti- child circle which industrial societies have created. Only government can take the lead - firstly, by making children a real priority, instead of the objects of sentimental rhetoric. Planners could redesign transport, housing and education facilities to put children nearer schools and give them safe means of walking or cycling there, reducing parents' reliance on the car. Employers could give parents rights to shorter hours which match the school or nursery day. Public spaces such as shops, pubs, stations, and government offices could be more child (and buggy) friendly.

Secondly the government must start paying the full cost of children. Children are not a commodity or a lifestyle choice: they are the future of our society, and society as a whole (yes, that means taxpayers) should pay for them. In short we need precisely what Mrs Thatcher derided - the nanny state. Not a nanny state that tells people whether to have children, but a nanny state that makes it easier to choose parenthood, and ensures that everyone, married or single, men or women, gay or straight, helps pay for it .

Thomas Malthus argued in the 19th century that too high a birth rate condemned a society to overpopulation which would eventually be "corrected" by disease and famine. But as the American demographer Ainsley Coale, pointed out, societies which evolve too low a birth rate face no such "correcting" mechanism. They simply fade from history as their populations decline: the social equivalent of a Darwinian "lethal mutation" in the natural world.

The liberal right used to talk of "emergency rescue action" necessary to reduce the size and role of the state. They got it. Welfare states across the West have withered under a taxpayers' revolt. This is the ultimate in short termism. We need emergency action of the opposite kind now. The alternative is the death of the West, with its liberal traditions, not through the bang of warfare or civil disorder, but the whimper of population decline.

Dr John MacInnes is reader in sociology at Edinburgh University

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